(I'm a few days behind in uploading this blog, so it'll take me a little bit to get caught up. I will post the last three days of blogs as soon as possible)
It seems like last minute packing is going to become a tradition on this trip. With only a few hours until flight time, I had only managed to put a single pair of jeans into my own suitcase. However, there were mitigating circumstances, so don't think I was procrastinating! After a brief nap Saturday night, I woke up around 1:00am on Sunday morning and got to work on finishing the mounds of paperwork required for this trip. Vaccination records, e-tickets, medical waivers, etc... all had to be checked and sorted. I still had the host/Thai family contact information documents to finish (sorry about that!).
I'd also asked all the parents to give me an extra suitcase so we could pack bedding, snacks, dishes, and gifts. Every few hours, I would take a break from typing to pack a few suitcases.
Just because I didn't have enough to do, one of the teachers at my center decided to quit on short notice, and so Sunday morning I had to go over to the apartment I had rented for her to check it and collect the keys. After a bit of completely unnecessary drama, I got the keys and I headed down to Siam Paragon to exchange money for the trip. Most banks are closed on Sundays, but the ones in malls stay open everyday. Since Siam Paragon is one of the biggest malls located in the touristy part of downtown Bangkok, it has a large money exchance counter. After that, I had to run up to Jatujak Market to purchase some gifts for the host families and school principals involved in the homestay program. Then, balancing two large bags of gifts, I took a quick motorcycle-taxi trip up to my center in Bon Marche' Market to drop off the gifts. Next, I took a motorcycle-taxi down Lat Prao Road (a 24/7-parking-lot of a traffic jam) to get to my dentist appointment at the hospital.
I obviously haven't had enough problems getting this trip together, and so the universe decided that right before we leave, that I should break a tooth biting into an apple. Around 20 years ago, I'd had an accident on my bike and knocked both my front teeth out. So they had put artifical caps on the original roots, and those held up surprisingly well over the past two decades. However, one of the teeth under the caps finally decided to crack, and to do so at the most impractical time possible. So just a few hours before I had to get on an airplane with 18 kids, I'm sitting in the hospital getting emergency dental surgery. Ugh!Given the time constraints, the dentist decided to just put in a temporary bridge until I could come back from America and get proper implants put in. In America, that kind of thing might cost over $10,000, but in Thailand it would be much "cheaper" (only about $2500 or 70,000 baht). So I was very motivated to get the work down in Thailand, however there simply wasn't enough time to allow the gums and bones to heal to the point were implants could be inserted. The dentist and I agreed that a temporary "patch" was the best option and after about an hour of grinding, pulling, tugging, wiggling, and gluing, I had a reasonably secure mouthful of teeth again. Yay.... Thank goodness I'd had root canals done after the original accident, so I didn't need any anesthesia. I didn't want to get on the airplane with a fuzzy head!
Once I finished at the dentist, I headed back to Bon Marche', picked up the gifts, and made it back up to the BoonToh Center by 8pm. By then it was time to do some last-minute snack shopping at Big C. Since we were staying some place I'd never been before and since we were arriving so late at night, my concern was that we wouldn't have anything for the kids to eat. I had no idea how far the house was from the local market or whether or not it was a 24-hour market. I also didn't want to trudge several dozen blocks in the middle of the night in sub-zero weather just to pick up some snacks for hungry kids. I wanted to have all that ready before we left, and so I went shopping at Big C and then I emptied out my center of every snack, dish, cup, and utensil I could find. I also had to find a late-night copy shop (I found one near BigC, but seriously, Thailand really needs a Kinko's). Take a packet of 15 documents, multiply it by 18 students, and then multiply it again by 4 copies (one for school, parent, hosts, and me) and you get an idea of how I spent my night.
Of course, this trip wouldn't be complete without one final problem. As if we didn't have enough problems getting visa interviews, worrying about Japanese radiation, finding host families at the last minute, getting broken teeth fixed, and the dozens of other things that seemed to go wrong every week, we needed to have just one more problem to put the cherry on this sundae of tribulation! Haha! While sorting out the photocopies at the center Sunday night, Jan and her mom came over to drop off an extra bag and give me Jan's passport copies. It's a good thing they came too! Last year, when Jan went, she'd changed her name and so the travel agent booked her ticket under her old name instead of the new one. This year, the travel agent did the same thing again! Of course, it's still my fault because I didn't catch the error much sooner. I should have noticed that Jan's passport didn't match her e-ticket, which is not something you want to discover five hours before your flight departs!! Ack!! Luckily, I contacted Delta and they said all we would need is Jan's old passport and a copy of the name-change document from the Thai government. So Jan and her mother rushed back home to get those things. Whew!
Surprisingly, I managed to get almost everything else done by 1am Monday morning. In spite of all the snags and snafus we hit while planning this trip, in the end I was going through my checklist of things-to-do and had it nearly checked all of them off by the time Oaky's parents showed up with a truck to collect all the suitcases. So if I hadn't gotten around to actually packing my own stuff, at least I had managed to pack 18 other suitcases, bought all the gifts and snacks, made all the photocopies, sort out Jan's ticket/passport name problem, bought a couple of birthday cakes for Nuchy, and gotten emergency dental work done. That's a pretty full day, right?
Around 2:30am, I finished all the last minute details, hurried shoved a bunch of clothes into my own suitcase, and got into the truck with Oaky's dad. Everyone was supposed to meet at the airport at 3:00am and we arrived only 15 minutes late, so I count that as a "win"! Whoot!
At the airport, we were greeted by a group of very excited students and very nervous parents. This was a familiar scene from last year, and so I knew everything would be alright. A rather pushy Delta agent prevented us from getting the paperwork handed out to the parents and also prevented us from checking in all the bags at the same time (because some people were still arriving and he'd already prodded people to start checking in). I had intentionally packed all the extra bags rather light, so if anyone went overweight on their bags, we'd have some extra room for their things, but since most of the extra bags when through early, we weren't able to juggle things around. Which meant we ended up shoving dishes, cups and pans into carry-on bags. Gam had the rather hilarious luck to get a frying pan shoved into her backpack. I'm not sure if TSA regulations considered frying pans to be dangerous weapons, but I bet Gam still got some strange looks from the security people when her bag went through the x-ray machines. Haha!In spite of the artificially-produced hurry (hey Mr. Delta Agent, we made it to the gate in plenty of time and without long lines, so next time, just relax a bit, people are stressed out enough already without some pushy guy in a suit telling them they're going to miss their flight if they don't check in right now), we paused at the immigration check in to take a few group photos. Preparing for this trip had been a bit of a struggle, and involved quite a few sleepless nights for me, but here we were, standing at the international terminal entrance, getting ready to embark on a great adventure! Will there still be problems to encounter? Of course, but in the end, it'll all be worth it. This is an experience these kids will never forget and something that will hopefully change their lives forever. I'm very happy and proud to have played a role, and very thankful to everyone who has helped out along the way.
AMERICA HERE WE COME!
